off grid

Climate Town's comedic explainer on carbon offsets and whether companies can buy their way out of climate change. It argues that offsets won't save us, while granting they are not bad in principle.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on the state of the US power grid, why it needs fixing, and the risks of aging infrastructure.

A Last Week Tonight segment explaining carbon offsets, what they claim to do, and how they may worsen climate change. It looks at perverse incentives and questionable projects.

A one-minute clip from a 2016 Toronto conference in which Geoff Hinton comments on deep learning and radiology. He suggests radiologists should stop being trained because machines would soon read scans better.

A 'leaked' Microsoft video shown at its 2011 MGX conference that mocks Google's Gmail and Apps to promote Office 365. It attacks Google over email scanning and privacy.

Coffeezilla investigates Counter-Strike skin gambling, the role of Valve and the legal and PR response, including effects on minors.

Coffeezilla investigates the company behind the Rabbit R1 AI gadget, alleging a shady history as a crypto and NFT startup and questioning its large action model claims.

Coffeezilla reacts to Sam Bankman-Fried's explanation of yield farming on the Odd Lots podcast, arguing he effectively described a Ponzi scheme. The video was made well before FTX collapsed.

Thunderf00t goes through the three UFO videos released by the Pentagon and offers mundane explanations for each. He treats the footage as sensor artifacts, parallax and camera effects rather than alien craft.

Thunderf00t argues that the Pentagon's officially released 'UFO' videos have mundane explanations such as birds, parallax and sensor artifacts.

Louis Rossmann reacts to a CBC News segment in which an Apple Genius Bar quoted a costly logic board and display replacement for a MacBook that had only a bent pin. He explains why the repair is simple and what the case shows about Apple's repair practices.

Thunderf00t critiques the TeamTrees campaign, doing the math on how little carbon 20 million trees would actually offset. He argues that tree planting is far from adequate against global emissions.

Coffeezilla gives a comprehensive history of Tether, the stablecoin issued by a company controlled by the owners of Bitfinex. He lays out accusations that it is not fully backed.

Coffee Break analyzes about 40,000 videos from seven months of YouTube's trending tab. It examines whether trending is biased toward mainstream media and late-night shows.

A former Microsoft SDET with 15 years on Windows gives his view on why Windows 10 updates keep shipping with bugs. He points to changes in how the company tests its software.

A clip of Milton Friedman answering an audience member about Ford's decision not to recall the Pinto, in which he defends weighing safety costs against benefits. The uploader's framing is strongly hostile to Friedman.

A Thunderf00t video debunking Energy Vault, a gravity-based energy storage scheme that stacks concrete blocks with cranes. He argues it is impractical and compares it to pseudoscience.

Adam Something argues in four minutes that gravity batteries like Energy Vault, which lift concrete blocks with cranes, are a poor energy storage idea. He draws on a longer Thunderf00t debunk.

A Last Week Tonight segment on pig butchering scams, in which long-con romance and investment fraud is run, often by trafficked workers. It explains how victims are groomed and interviews people who lost large sums.

Veritasium explains why clickbait titles and thumbnails work, how he tests them, and why educational creators feel pushed to use them. He classifies types of clickbait and discusses the trade-offs.

A short clip of Stephen Fry defending swearing as a rich and essential part of the English language and rejecting the idea that it is unnecessary.

Naomi Wu visits the Shenzhen offices of smartphone maker UMIDIGI in person to get them to release source code they owed under the GPLv2, and they comply.

A one-minute clip of Slavoj Zizek showing what he calls the official geographical limit between the Balkans and Central Europe, standing at a river in Ljubljana. It is a short, absurd and funny piece of cultural geography.

Thunderf00t analyzes the leaked Pentagon UFO videos and offers mundane explanations for the fuzzy triangle and tic-tac footage.

Adam Something gives a short, tongue-in-cheek defense of Soviet-era prefab apartment blocks. He argues they offer efficient, dense housing with schools and services built nearby.

Blender Guru's Andrew Price proposes a redesign of Blender's user interface, answering the usability problems raised in earlier parts of the series. He later noted the proposal had flaws and posted a follow-up.

A short video promoting the claim that Madeleine Albright said the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children from sanctions were 'worth it', timed to her receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It reuses a 1996 Sixty Minutes interview clip.